08.27.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 12:32 pm by yuka
First off, while we were away, looks like that new WoW patch (Drums of War) came out, so click link above for the full notes. Looking forward next week to some serious AV-ing with not-so-familiar faces :)
Tales of the Tempest is set for release on 26th October, approx. cost £25.20 on DS. Like all the other ”Tales of” series, but well, if you’re a collector of such RPGs, you may be interested – much has been said of this game at least. Those pre-ordering will get an Official Fan Book (full of in-game trivia) and an original pouch with logo.
Valkyrie Profile 2 – Silmeria – Voice Mix Album is out now for £14.70. Incidentally, there’re a load of other VP and FF CDs out at the moment from just about any music shop you amble into in Tokyo… although if you’re out looking for Mario/Zelda related music, you might be better off ordering online.
Although the price or release date is currently unannounced, there seems to be much hype surrounding the new Genji game for the PS3. If anything, it does look good. Genji, for those of you interested in a bit of old Japanese history, was one of two families (the other being Heishi) embroiled in a bitter feud – think War of the Roses, but slightly earlier. So it’s basically a ‘historical’ action/RPG… kind of, not unlike the Onimusha series.
Oh, and if you’re interested in a pink PSP, look no further (scroll down for pic). Personally, I think the new pink DSLite looks better though. Both, pink versions are of course, for us females, supposedly. Specifically (as regards the PSP), us female gamers in Europe, as no plans are in place to release them outside of our region. And no mention of when it’ll be out (article mentions that the pink PSP was shown on the business day of the conference, not the public day).
Just a random Mario sweet we picked up in Family Mart (a convenience store chain). Where else, but in Japan? (Apologies to people who get rss feeds – my last attempt at inserting this pic failed because apparently Word Press just fucked things up again.)
Finally we get to FF III. The game itself is out now on DS (in Japan… cross your fingers it’ll make it overseas soon), but the original soundtrack should be out too by 20th September for approx. £12.50. It’ll be a 2CD set plus a special DVD (opening movie, promotional vid, special interview). The above link will take you to their official page for the CD, where a few tracks are showcased in the Sound Preview section (left: Prelude, Opening Theme, Endless Wind; right: Curse of Jinn, Hometown, Chocobo’s Theme).
The game itself costs approx. £29.90 and it’s official site is found here. It’s all fairly explanatory though, so excuse me if I don’t go translating bits of it. Plus, it’s pissed me off a bit with the ever-scrolling ‘Prologue’ section… just like the Kingdom Hearts II site did for the Story bit. You can’t even cut and paste, so no chance of an accurate translation opportunity without my having to memorise whole chunks of the blurb. Despicable! Oh, and you can attempt to find out what’s in the Download section. I’ve been trying for the last five mins, without any sign of anything happening. The site’s a mess, like all Japanese sites seem to be, but the game’s touted as being one of the best to come out this quarter anyhoo.
Right, now I’m off back to Titan Quest – this game is surprisingly good, not least because I like the Age of Empires series. It’s a good mix of good graphics, and good old fashioned hack/slash action adventure. Think I’ll vent my ill will towards Square Enix’s official site developers on some nice undeads willing to get the sharp end of my epic spear.
Permalink
03.02.06
Posted in Japanese, Links at 10:01 pm by yuka
It occured to me that I probably haven’t mentioned Onimusha has seven wallpapers on show now. Unlike some of the sites, this link will take you straight to the download page :) By the way, the theme song just sounds terrible. Bad bad idea of Capcom’s to take on Ayumi Hamazaki. No wonder Japanese fans of the game was affronted.
Permalink
02.26.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 6:35 pm by yuka
Valkyrie Profile (and that’s both versions) have had an update on their site. For Lenneth, go check out their TV ad movie (Outlines, then the second one down). For Silmeria, they’ve added a new character.
More DS-related Mana wallpapers in the Downloads section (from left, the three new ones): Package art, Rabi, and Rabi 2. Oh, and the DS site itself sports another character info… I’m sure they’ve misspelt this though – Mysteries Man… it says. But what it says in Japanese suggests it should have been Mysterious Man. Ah well :)
For DQ VIII Boy Yangus, new Promotion Video for shops can be seen… third tab from top is the one for Movies, by the way.
Puyo Puyo fans can indulge in some free online play apparently if you register at the Sega main site and then go to this site. It’s due to open early March, or so they say.
Meanwhile, Nintendo has apologised to their many customers – DS Lite Ice Blue and Enamel Navy, due to some complications during production, will only be out from 11th March. And it’s not all bad news for them as the highly anticipated Tales of the Tempest (one of the ‘Tales of’ series from Namco) is due out on 13th April on the DS. For screenshots of the characters, see here. It comes with the proper ‘cooking’ procedures, so much a part of the game, and it utilises the DS touch screen completely through the cooking process, as seen here.
I will try writing a bit more over the next few days… Who am I kidding? Don’t count on it – just got RF Online, so I have a feeling, I won’t be of much use for a few days :)
Permalink
02.13.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 1:47 pm by yuka
World of Mana site has had another of those periodic updates. In the Download section, you’ll now be able to download four character wallpapers (from left: Flick, Tumble, Pop and Wanderer) as well as the previously mentioned little Rabi (that hops around your desktop). In the Trailers section, five promotional videos (from left): Mana DS TV ad anime version A, Mana DS TV ad anime version B, Mana DS Jump Festa 2006 movie, Mana 4 Jump Festa 2006 movie, Mana Project E3 movie.
For those of you who want to ogle and drool over the new DS Lite models, click here. Available in three colours for now, they are Crystal White, Ice Blue and Enamel Navy.
Dragon Quest fans can, whilst waiting for the new Boy Yangus game to come out (20th April), browse and find a wallpaper download on their site. I know, sadly, it’s all in Japanese. See on the left hand side there’re those ‘wooden’ tabs? Second up from the bottom is the download one. Click on the size you want, and hey, you’ve got it.
Nintendo has announced a few titles that will be released as of April… as follows:
13th – Starfy 4 (DS), Tales of the Tempest (DS); 20th – Zoo Tycoon (DS), Mother 3 (GBA); 27th – Konami, the Best of series (GBA). Not much then… and no doubt, not much of that will come abroad…
Permalink
01.30.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News, Reviews at 3:11 pm by yuka
The Okami site has been upgraded – go to the last tab that has 戦闘 written on it, and the third and fourth pages will have clickable movies for the character’s moves.
Baten Kaitos II has a new site up. From left: Story, Characters, Battle, Movie. It’ll be out 23rd Feb. for approx. £34 for the GC. It’ll need 6 memory blocks, and is playable by one only.
Lost Magic translation then. From left: Summary, World View, Story, How to play, Battle, Character, Creatures… second row, from left: Novel, and Gallery.
Story: A world where the Creator has already died. The Creator passed away but left 6 ‘magic’s and 7 staves. The staves were long held by the wise men of the world and was passed from master to apprentice and so on. Over a thousand years had passed since the death when this story begins. All that had gone wrong over the years, the boy (main character) will have to set right, by using the magics and the stave left him.
Character: 3 main characters on the right, 7 characters they meet on the way at bottom.
This game has been out since 19th Jan. on the DS for approx. £25 (Action RPG/1-2 player) and seems to be quite popular. It is well noted that the DS touch screen usage is much in evidence in game-play (draw a ‘rune’ or two to perform magic), and it can be played over the Wi-fi connection, albeit, up to two players. You never know… it might make it outside Japan. From what can be divulged from the interview (from Nintendo Inside), the world and characters are done with the help of Yoshiharu Sato (art director) who has helped make many of the Ghibli films successful. One to watch out for, perhaps?
Permalink
01.12.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 1:22 pm by yuka
Children of Mana DS is going to be coming out 2nd March instead of 23rd Feb due to a major quality upgrade, or so the official site tells us. They apologize for the delay and ask the gamers to be patient, in typical Japanese style.
On the PSP front, there’s going to be a new version of Talkman (European Version) featuring six languages this time round: British English, Italian, Spanish, German, French and Japanese. The previous version did have English, but they claim it was American English, and therefore this version’s English will have proper English vocab and pronunciations. Famitsu site recommends taking it on holiday with you, so expect a horde of Japanese tourists touting PSPs and attempting to speak in an ‘authentic’ accent near you.
Finally managed to get into the Kingdom Hearts 2 site’s Storyline area. As the page tends to scroll with no way of stopping it, I can only give you the jist of the story… where Sora lost his best friend Riku (kind of poetic really, if you think sora means sky and riku means land) and Donald and Goofy lost their King, to save the worlds, they embark on another adventure. On the one road that they’re on, a cloaked man appears and foretells that they will find something important when they reach the end of the road, but in return, they will also lose something precious, and then he disappears. As they trudge wearily on, they come to a castle. Upon entering it and wandering around, they slowly lose their memories. They do meet a strange girl called Namine inside though, who apparently has something to do with their memories. As fate would have it, the King and Riku are also visiting the castle at the same time. One year on, the story begins anew in Twilight Town.
The other updates on the site includes info that the theme song is sung by Hikaru Utada (which, to my knowledge didn’t incite a mass furore, as opposed to the Shin Onimusha theme song, so it’s probably OK), and that Twilight Town is now open. Now the latter, I’ve tried… you need to be able to understand Japanese and also have played the game enough to unlock parts of. So far, I’ve managed to find four wallpapers that you won’t find in the Downloads section. These depict Sora in: Wisdom from, Brave form, Final Form and Master Form.
Permalink
01.10.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 10:58 am by yuka
FF XII is on pre-order status now in Japan. Once pre-ordered, you will exclusively obtain a ‘FF XII/iTunes Custom Card’ which will enable you to download five tunes from the anticipated series free (though quite obviously the download fee is up to each customer). There is only a limited number of these available, so get yours fast.
New content has been revealed for Okami as seen here. The top two screenshots show the main character Amaterasu (in wolf shape). Being a wolf, she cannot swim for too long or she will drown. To aid her over long distances over water, you can perform a bit of magic – draw a circle and out pops a lily pad onto which she can step on. Nice.
So, translation time then. After the intro, you’ll get to a page full of ‘weird’ (for you guys anyway) Japanese scrawls on little tablets. Game Intro (red), Blog (green), Movies (orange), Mini-games (pink), Village Life (blue). The middle bit is all about when it’s out; the other two (from left) clickables are for postcard (nenga-jyo download) and a survey (you will need to be able to understand Japanese and have IE5.0 or above for this).
Game Intro then…
Summary: Amaterasu (Shinto sun goddess, really) has a job to restore nature. She socialises with people and grants their wishes, socialises also with the wildlife. But battles the evil brought on by yokai (妖怪:think sprites and imps). After Amaterasu has done a good job, the area will once again be full of vitality. Using the washi (和紙: Japanese paper) and fude (筆: calligraphy type pen) effects would hopefully emulate a unique adventure experience.
Story: “Long, long ago in a little settlement (the village), the people believed in Okami (大神) who was the mighty god who brought peace and prosperity wherever she went. One day however, a great catastrophe befell them in the form of a yokai – Yamatano-orochi, who had been magically sealed up until then. This evil spirit swallowed every living thing, every joyous thing that was around, including the sun, and shrouded everything in darkness and misery. To this, Amaterasu was prayed for and she arrives to battle the demons and bring back the peace.”
Great Mother Nature: with the use of her basic magical powers, Amaterasu overcomes each area and gains more power for the use of good (villagers and wildlife). This is known as Okami-oroshi (大神降し).
Fude: you can scroll through and click on a circle to activate a screen view (click on the screen to start) of some of the moves Amaterasu can do, using the fude. This is known as fude-shirabe (筆しらべ).
Action: click on the numbers and then click on screen to start the movie.
Character: (from left) first row – Amaterasu, Issun (ickle fairy), Sakuya-hime (tree fairy), Chief Mikan, Mrs. Mikan, Susano-o (sword-fighter); second row – Kushinada (bar owner), Mushikai (little boy), Mushikai’s mum, Merchant, Sazanka and Tsubaki (two sisters visiting the village), Komuso (Buddhist monk); third row – Ushiwaka (prophet of sorts), Shita-kiri (tongue-cutting) hag and old man, Team Suzume (sparrows), Take-tori man (an old man who cuts bamboo), Fuse-hime, Momo-taro (born from a giant peach); fourth row – Otohime (underwater demi-goddess). *Third row onwards are characters from Japanese fairy tales that most people will be familiar with.
Permalink
01.07.06
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 6:00 pm by yuka
Festivities being over, I’d imagine the Japanese will be hustling and bustling as per usual (think worker ants) to come up with more RPGs that are ‘original’…
First up, some Nintendo news. Super Mario Strikers, due out on 19th this month for approx. £29 on GC (playable by 4, 5 memory blocks) has a new page up. From top: Game Intro, Item, and Character (then at the bottom left corner, Movie). Fortunately for me, this site is a case of ‘look and understand’, so I won’t be translating :)
Anyone still interested in Pokemon news? For those of you who still are, Pokemon Dungeon should satisfy your cravings. It’s been updated with the news that there’s some dungeons you can get by registering etc. for a limited time only.
And oh some happy news in the form of discounted games for the GBA. Amongst those are popular titles such as the Golden Sun, Shining Soul, Summon Knight and Mother 1+2, and they all cost half of the original price tag. See? Happy news indeed.
As if to put a dampener on my spirit, Hudson Kingdom is being an arse. They advertise loud and clear that with online registration, you can play Bomberman games amongst others for free. And then they tell me because I don’t use IE 6 (I’m on Mozilla Firefox) I won’t be able to view the site. That sucks.
On the RPG-related front, Japan is finally catching up – Guild Wars Beta will be between 10th and 24th this month, with its official release on the 27th. From 16th March, Sony is set to sell PS2 FF XII Pack for an open price.
Finally news on Valkyrie Profile. VP Lenneth for the PSP will be sold for £24 and will be out on 2nd March, while VP Silmeria for PS2 will be sometime in the next year for an unknown cost (as of this moment). For now, I’ll be translating the Lenneth version: Story, World, Character, System, Outline, New Element.
Story: “The story begins with a young girl’s death… A girl about to be sold by her own mother to prostitute herself in cities, ran away with her childhood friend. When finally they escaped, they had reached a field full of lily of the valleys. To the joyous girl, the boy begs her to be careful of the poison. However, the girl retorts that she’d rather die happy now than face more misery. The boy loves the girl but the girl dies in his arms soon after, and his howls of grief echoes around.”
World: Separated into Dungeon and Crystal mode, the moves you can do with each. (Pretty self-explanatory)
Character: Again, self-explanatory. Please excuse me if I don’t transate all their backgrounds.
System: Separated into Battle and God-world mode
Outline: Summary and Promotion Movie
Permalink
12.29.05
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 4:29 pm by yuka
Oh the joys of WordPress. Last night as I tried to type this up, the whole thing disappeared off the face of this planet… it was almost enough to make me start smoking again. Well, here we go again, hoping for better luck this time.
The day before yesterday, Square Enix announced that Kingdom Hearts II, within three days of it being released in Japan, sold over a million copies of the game. Good for them. And they’ve also announced a new update on their Mana DS site – apparently they’ve added new moving images to do with character moves.
Dirge of Cerberus site has six categories: Story, Character, System, Download, Info and Promotional Video. I’d love to translate the whole site, but for now due to the possibility that WordPress might delete everything, I’ll just stick to the story… (by the way, it loads much in the same way as the Kingdom Hearts II site, so be patient): “As of now, the whole world is our arena. Those who are not worthy to be chosen will be faced with torture and misery. Three years after the story of Final Fantasy VII a mysterious gang of mecenaries started attacking the towns. This gang was the Deep Ground Soldiers (DG Soldiers) who were thought to have been buried underground when the meteor hit. This story’s main character, Vincent Valentine, is thought to have been involved in this incident… whether he was or not remains a mystery, as is what may have happened in those three years.”
Permalink
12.22.05
Posted in Japanese, Links, News at 11:39 am by yuka
Dragon Quest – Boy Yangus – site has released a short video clip for the upcoming game. If you can stand the constant ‘buffering’ and not understanding the narration, click the button at bottom of page. It looks like one playable game – personal reminder to ask mate to send it :)
As of today also, Capcom has announced a Game on Demand service… as in, you can play those Capcom games on your computer, be it Windows or Macs. You will need to register, however, so click on the game you want to play and the first clickable bit, click – takes you to a pop up window for registering. Email address, retype email, User ID, password, retype password, sex: left is for women, right for men, date of birth (year, month, day), postcode (Japanese one I’m afraid), occupation (no doubt you can leave it blank or pick ‘other’ which is right at the bottom), click the obligatory ‘I agree’ with terms of contract etc., and then click the blue button – you’ve made it. So far, the games available are: Dino Crisis, Chaos Legion, Bio Hazard 3 and Rockman X5. From January, Bio Hazard 2 and Onimusha 3 will be available.
Kingdom Hearts II is out today in Japan, and the site has two new wallpapers added. You will need to put your name in to access the Flash site by the way. It’ll lead you to the main page which has the categories (from top): Story, Character, World, Twilight Town, Download, System and News.
Story: for some unknown reason, it was taking an unreasonable amount of time (I waited ten mins) to download, so let’s skip that, shall we?
Character: starting with Sora, you can scroll through and see the cast
World: if you’re familiar with the Disney productions, no problem
Twilight Town: it’s the first town you’re at… the rest is ‘under construction’
Download: 3 types of wallpapers in 3 different sizes
System: 1) Drive – Brave form, Wisdom form, Master form, Final form; 2) Invocation magic – Stitch, Chicken Little, Peter Pan, Genie
News: 1) Luxury Boxset – Ultimate hits and game (PS2), Chain of Memoris (GBA) and original poster for approx. £80; 2) (scrolling right) Promotion Video – Jump Fest; 3) Specs etc. – costs approx. £39; 4) Promotion Video – Tokyo Game Show; 5) Theme song; 6) Promotion Video – for stores; 7) if pre-ordered, depending on stock, possible to get a postcard calendar.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »